Sir Winston Churchill once said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” This is also true or even especially true for the workspace; in the age of the mobile workforce the focus is more on the design of the personal cloud-based workspace, rather than on spatial concepts. After all, high workforce productivity and satisfaction are directly related to the functionality, efficiency and security of the work environment. Similar to the ancient Greek temple builders, MyWorkspace relies on the tested and proven pillar principle.

No company that moves into the cloud will just throw away their equipment to set up completely new cloud workspaces. Most companies take their existing “furniture”, i.e., existing applications along and add some cloud “furnishings” to set up hybrid clouds where multiple applications are connected and data are exchanged automatically. Independent from the details of the workspace set-up, it is the following three pillars that form the foundation of the cloud workspace:

1) Identity & Access Management

Employees want to access their applications and data anytime, from any device and anywhere without having to manage a plethora of web addresses and log-in data themselves. MyWorkspace requires one single password to be used as access portal to their personal workspace – a very easy and convenient approach for end users, ensuring highly satisfied employees. Therefore, it is mandatory for the IT staff to have a look at identity & access management when setting up the cloud-based workspace. MyWorkspace combines new federated security methodologies with existing infrastructures such as the local Active Directory, which makes it possible to put all applications, be it SaaS, web or legacy applications, under the same “cloud roof”; it is also a prerequisite for on- and especially off-boarding processes. The option to withdraw permissions in case of need immediately and completely is invaluable. Therefore, identity & access management is one of the supporting pillars of the (hybrid) cloud-based workspace. It looks as follows:

2) Remote and legacy apps

Employees want access to all of their applications and normally they do not distinguish between services and applications that are provisioned from the cloud or those that are provisioned locally for their work. Therefore, MyWorkspace integrates locally installed applications as well as the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services seamlessly into the modern workspace, no matter whether it is provisioned on-premise or from the cloud. Here is a video with more detailed information:

3) Software and license compliance

New subscription-based licensing models increase the flexibility of cloud services and provide all companies access to solutions that were previously reserved to large corporations only. However, usage-based billing models often lack transparency, which is requested and urgently needed by IT and finance departments. Therefore, MyWorkspace ensures a detailed overview of all cost and concrete utilization rates of cloud services, SaaS and web apps – in compliance with works council regulations and in anonymized form, if desired. Such overview looks as follows:

These three pillars provide every company a stable and sustainable basis, on which cloud-based workspaces can be set up according to company-specific requirements. Finally, let’s come back again to the ancient Greeks and say that MyWorkspace is an advocate of Pericles who said: “It’s the people that make a city, not the buildings.”